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Is Learning Your Partners Language Important to your Relationship?

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Chris:
Do you think that a Western man/woman marrying a Russian man/woman should know their language?

How important is it to know the language of a person you are in love with? Do you put in an extra effort to learn the language or do you expect your wife/husband/partner to learn your language?

We usually take for granted that most couples eventually start living together in the mans country, therefore it is usually the women who has to make more of an effort to learn her husbands langauge, usually English, some do go the other way though. For those that do,  how far do they go to learn Russian if he/she goes to live in Russia with their wife/partner?   

There are a lot of men and women on here already married to partners from other countries, what have your experiences been in developing your relationship when it comes specifically to learning the others language? 

mje:
I do want to learn the other language, if only to be able to talk to my inlaws

Chris:
mje

You mentioned in another thread that a foreign spouse needs to take an exam in Dutch as one criteria of moving to Holland. How has this affected mixed nationality relationships in your country.

Chris

mje:
It has slowed down immigration for people who want to follow the law.

In the long run , the exam is ment to make sure that people do not become prisoners in their own home because of their spouse.  The people do not want to say this out loud, but they mean muslim women of course.

From what I have read about other dutch guys dating internationally the exam is a joke though, you get 90 questions and you have to score 16/90 correctly to pass. That is not a whole lot. Seems like this exam is only a political-game and not something that might last. An acquaintance of mine married a thai woman and he gave me some good pointers about immigration.

mendeleyev:
I believe it quite important--her native language is the language of her heart.  Hearing things like "I love you" means so much more if you don't have to mentally translate it first before processing that though in the heart.

I didn't thnk much of it until several years ago when my Dad passed.  Dutch was his native language but we didn't hear it a lot during most of our lives.  However on his deathbed in the final weeks, as life slowly slipped out of his grasp, he returned to the native language of his birth.  That had quite an impact on my brother and I...understanding how basic the birth language is to a human being's emotional makeup.

Now in intimate and close conversations, I often switch to Russian with my wife for this very reason.  She constantly wants to improve her English and I wish to do the same for my Russian so often we carry on a bi-lingual conversation with her in "pan-glee-skiy" and me in "pa-rous-skiy." 

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